One significant measure of mass storage device performance is the speed with which the computing system becomes responsive to user input. This is highly dependent upon the time it takes to perform the initial load of the Operating System (OS), which may be a cold-boot or a resume from hibernation. Current approaches to optimizing this performance focus on the time elapsed from power on or the first time the media is accessed. Such approaches are dependent upon the execution speed and device initialization sequence of the Basic Input Output Services (BIOS) and the OS.
An approach that uses additional information available to an attached mass storage device would provide a higher-confidence determination of the transition from OS loading, which tends to be repetitive, to the OS operational state, which is less predictable. Accordingly, an optimization approach, such as caching or predictive loading, would benefit from the knowledge of the phase of initialization in force at the time of a block access.